Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/507

Rh strove to raise its powers to the highest mechanical limits of the day. By rifling the inside of the barrel, and placing a sight on the rear end, he made his aim mathematically certain. With such a weapon he could encounter every mortal foe with entire confidence. Rattlesnake nor panther, wild Indian nor foreign mercenary, had any terrors for him. If his foe had brain or heart, his unerring bullet was sure to find it.

With his rifle in hand the common man reclothed himself with all the rights that had been torn from him by a thousand years of the despotism of the Man on Horseback. He brooked so little of tyranny that he would not endure so much of it as was involved in the attempt to tax him without his full consent. The assertion in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence differed from most similar fulminations in that it was not ahead but only abreast of the popular acceptance of the principles which it affirmed. Men were not only endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but on this side of the ocean they exercised them to the fullest extent.

Still more: they taught the Frenchmen who had come here to assist them in their final struggle for freedom, by precept, and those who had stayed at home by example, that the musket was the means by which those rights were obtained and maintained. They demonstrated in practice the axioms to a perception of which all Europe had been slowly rising: that before the musket's muzzle all men are equal; that lordly lineage, boundless wealth, nor privileged caste can hedge a man with a divinity impervious to bullets; but that any set of men, who love liberty well enough to peril life for it, must be met on equal terms, with equal hazard of life, by those who would deprive them of it; that the reign of the few was ending, and that of the many beginning, for, with all men equally able to kill their opposers, only those governments and systems of governments can maintain themselves which can rally to their support more than can be arrayed in opposition.

In all the world's history no teaching ever had such immediate and tremendous results. Within a quarter of a century after the close of the American Revolution the new Evangel of Freedom had flamed from the Seine to the Moskwa, at the muzzles of millions of muskets, borne by men who had suddenly risen from the abasement of serfdom to the full stature of manhood. In France, the chosen home of chivalry, the degenerate sons of the Men on Horseback had been drowned in a sea of their own vicious blood. In all the fairest parts of Continental Europe the land had been wrested from the heirs of the banditti-lords, and restored to the ownership of those who tilled it. The whole civilized world had begun that rapid march toward popular government

 ". . . whose compulsive course Ne'er knows retiring ebb,"